now: Axel packing his bags. The Whitefly documents-some part of his mind would have known they were important, had made him lock them up safe. And then he had run. Go west. The horses would have told him.
She was always destined to go there. The blind Teller had known it. She had told Adelaide months ago, but Adelaide hadn’t listened.
It has been spoken, sister. Spoken in the salt.
She glanced up at the stars, half hidden by cloud, and imagined Axel watching the same patterns. Waiting for the arrival of his twin.
What took you so long?
That was what he would say.
Twin searchlights beamed across the gap in the border netting, one from either side. There was a gap of seconds before they crossed. On the jetty, about fifty metres away, Adelaide saw the shadow of a guard.
Her heart began to thud. The full realization of what she was doing-what she had done-hit her forcefully. For a moment she was paralysed with doubt. Axel, she thought. Think of Axel. She waited, watching the circular arcs, counting the seconds between their passage. The searchlights crossed and separated, crossed and separated. The guard walked slowly across the jetty. At the edge he stopped, looking about. Adelaide cringed back inside her hood. Then his hands moved away from his gun, and as the searchlight swept over she saw that he was unbuckling his trousers to relieve himself.
Now was her chance. Keeping the motor to an almost inaudible hum, she urged the boat forward into the hundred metre stretch of water.
Manoeuvring between the beams of the searchlight, she used all of her strength to haul the boat this way and that. It seemed to take forever. The searchlight drew near. With a final wrench, the boat slipped past the narrow gap in the netting, only metres from the jetty and, she saw with a shock, a hulking barge.
She bent low to the boat and, not daring to look back, shot into the maze of the west.
On the other side there were no lights. Her thrill of exhilaration dissipated in the odd stillness. She looked about: up at the tower window-walls, ahead at the waterways. Not a glimmer. Vikram had told her about the west’s eternal problems with electricity, but this total darkness could not be right. Could it? She brought the boat’s engine down to a bare minimum and kept her lights off. Now she was crawling forward in near blackness, with only the glow from the retreating City to guide her on her way. It was fading all the time.
Fear gripped her. She was tempted to retreat, to get back into the City and find a friend’s apartment or a Boatel to hole up for the night. She turned the boat around, but the shadow of a bigger craft, crawling along the border, its searchlights seeking out the deepest troughs, made her steer towards the nearest tower.
You’re a Rechnov, she reminded herself. You’ve got no reason to be afraid.
But there was no reason for a Rechnov to be this side of the border, and if Vikram had taught her anything, it was that the Home Guards shot first and investigated afterwards.
A pale lambency drew her south, only to find that the light came not from any artificial source but from the sky itself. Her lips whispered silently as the spectacle became clear: aura australis. The aura dappled the night, shifting from green to yellow and back like a living, chameleon thing. She gazed skyward. Can you see this, Axel?
But as soon as they had appeared, the southern lights retreated. The boat rocked as she shifted her weight. What was down there, far below the surface? For the first time, she felt alien to her terrain.
She carried on, further into the west. The darkness was complete. She had planned to head for Vikram’s old tower, and from there to gain directions to the shelter, but without lights to guide her she had little chance of finding the right way. The lack of noise was beginning to spook her. It was as though the entire community had died.
She decided to navigate towards Vikram’s tower anyway. She had to judge the route based on her knowledge of the city’s contours, and an instinctive awareness of the west’s structural layout. The boat responded dutifully to her steering, although the sea was growing more aggressive and her hands inside their gloves were numb. She flexed her fingers. She could barely feel them. She wondered if her hearing had been similarly impaired by the cold.
A light winked over the waves, flashed against Adelaide’s boat and cut out.
“Psst! Get over here!”
After such a stretch of nothingness, she could hardly believe that the sound was real. But it had been human, that voice. She nosed the boat in its direction. The light winked on and off again, as she grew nearer. Her boat bumped against a decking.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“Stars! Are you crazy? Get inside!”
A hand latched onto Adelaide’s shoulder and tugged. She followed its pull, helpless in the darkness to do anything else, and climbed out of the boat.
“I need to tie up-”
“Pass me the chain, I’ll tie her.”
Adelaide hesitated, loathe to obey the anonymous voice. But neither did she want to return to the inky silence. She pocketed the keys and handed over the chain. Their gloves brushed. If the boat was secured, it was done noiselessly. The stranger’s hand found her arm once more and she was guided across the decking. There was a swish as the doors parted. They went into the tower.
The reek caught her by surprise. She coughed and swallowed the noise.
The voice switched on a penlight. Its tiny glow illuminated a blue hat pulled low over straggly hair, bright eyes in a dirty face. The girl was young; she could not be more than about fourteen. She cupped a hand around the penlight, shielding it between their two bodies.
“What are you doing out there?”
“I got lost,” Adelaide said.
“Lost? You lose track of time, or something?”
“I made a few bad turns, before I knew it…”
“Before you knew it, you were past curfew. You got to be careful, lady! Them boats out there, they don’t listen to excuses!”
“Yeah, I–I know.”
“Lucky I spotted you. I’m on watch here. They say I have seagull eyes. You want to sit with me for a bit? Gets boring on my own.”
“Sure.”
The girl switched off the penlight. Adelaide heard her fumbling with a lever. The tower doors opened with a soft whoosh and the girl settled down in the entrance. Adelaide sat beside her. Stationary, she felt the bitter cold. She wrapped her arms around her, wondering how many hours until daylight.
“You see a light-the slightest light-you tell me,” said the western girl, keeping her voice low. “And if you hear talking and all. That’s the one thing about them skadi. ” She spat the word with venom. “They make one hell of a racket-always know when they’re coming.” She added, more bitterly, “Guess you don’t need stealth when you got guns.”
“I’ll keep my ears open,” Adelaide promised. The stars knew she had her own reasons to keep her distance from the Guard. Skadi. She practised the word in her head. In the darkness the watch-girl would not see her lips moving.
It gave her an idea. She rubbed her gloved palms silently over the floor, and then over her face. She didn’t want to think about what was on the decking floor, but she was sure it had dirtied her face.
“They haven’t done this tower yet,” said the girl. “They might tonight. If they come we’ve got to shut this door quick. Ain’t no locking from inside but we got a good warning system. Kind of relay thing.”
“Do the boats come past here often?” Adelaide asked. She could not remember Vikram ever telling her about an alarm system, nor, now she thought about it, of patrol boats going through the western waterways so regularly.
“This neighbourhood there’s one every hour or so,” said the girl. “But they’re getting more often since the greenhouse. You must have been lucky not to meet one. Horrible things. I hate the way they sort of glide by, you know, as if they wasn’t really there.”
“ Skadi,” said Adelaide, putting enough contempt into the word to cover, she hoped, any mistake in
